An Experimental Investigation on Inclined Negatively Buoyant Jets

An experimental study was performed to investigate the behavior of inclined negatively buoyant jets. Such jets arise when brine is discharged from desalination plants. A turbulent jet with a specific salinity was discharged through a circular nozzle at an angle to the horizontal into a tank with fresh water and the spatial evolution of the jet was recorded. Four different initial jet parameters were changed, namely the nozzle diameter, the initial jet inclination, the jet density and the flow rate. Five geometric quantities describing the jet trajectory that are useful in the design of brine discharge systems were determined. Dimensional analysis demonstrated that the geometric jet quantities studied, if normalized with the jet exit diameter, could be related to the densimetric Froude number. Analysis of the collected data showed that this was the case for a Froude number less than 100, whereas for larger values of the Froude number the scatter in the data increased significantly. As has been observed in some previous investigations, the slope of the best-fit straight line through the data points was a function of the initial jet angle (theta), where the slope increased with. for the maximum levels (Y-m) studied, but had a more complex behavior for horizontal distances.